Review – The Red House Mystery

The Red House Mystery, A.A. Milne

It seems weird that the author of Winnie-the-Pooh also wrote a fairly classic murder mystery, complete with amateur detective and his Watson, but there you go. Antony, the amateur detective, shows up more or less coincidentally at the Red House because his friend Bill is staying there, only to find himself immediately involved in the finding of a body, the brother of the home’s owner. The owner of the house is missing, and his faithful cousin/solicitor/man-of-all-work Cayley holds down the fort while the police investigate, obligingly dragging the pond and searching the railways for the missing man. But Antony’s very observant, and can replay in his mind everything that happened, and he notices a few inconsistencies…

It’s one of those stories where I quickly jumped to some conclusions that turned out to be right, but had to wait for the story to work itself out to figure out why it was right. There was some witty dialogue and the mystery isn’t bad, but it’s not one that will stick in my mind. I find that having finished it just yesterday, there’s not that much to say about it. It was okay, and the detective was okay, and I rather liked Milne’s introduction explaining quite firmly that he had written the kind of detective story he thought was worth reading (no forensics, just cool deduction!). I think the forensics can actually add a whole extra line of misdirection under skilled hands, and don’t need to exclude the reader from understanding, so I disagree with him — but it’s an interesting perspective.

Anyway, overall not impressed, but it was fun enough while I was reading it.